Born in hospitals, vaccinated, X-rayed, taking antibiotics, receiving transplants – medicine sets the parameters of our lives. Since a great deal of biology, chemistry and physics has been and continues to be done as part of medicine, it is also central to HPS. This paper is about how, and with what consequences, a new, scientific medicine was made for the modern world. The Michaelmas Term course surveys the creation since 1750 of new medical institutions, professionals and practices. The Lent Term course explores the 20th-century transformation of medicine into a major object of economic, political and ethical concern.

Aims and learning outcomes

to acquaint students with fundamental issues in historical writing on medicine and allied sciences since 1750;

to provide students with an understanding of the principal changes that created the medical and biomedical institutions, professionals and practices of the modern world;

to introduce students to the processes through which medicine was transformed into a major object of economic, political and ethical concern; and

to encourage students to explore major themes in the history of modern medical encounters with bodies and minds.

Lectures

Science in the Making of Modern MedicineSalim Al-Gailani, Nick Hopwood (12 lectures, Michaelmas Term)

This course surveys the roles of the sciences in making modern medicine from the French Revolution to World War I. We explore the creation in the long 19th century of new institutions, especially hospitals and laboratories; of new professionals working in them as physicians, surgeons, public-health officers, nurses and especially scientists; and of new ways of understanding and treating disease. We investigate how relations between doctors and individual patients changed, and explore the role of medicine in managing the health of populations. We discuss how a medicine made largely in Western Europe was exported around the world.

Though our medicine had in its essential features been made by World War I, only in the 20th century did it become a major economic and political concern, and a profession with extraordinarily far-reaching authority in the management and even definition of human life. Highlighting the turning points of World War II and the crisis of the early 1970s, this course explores the creation of medical research and the 'biomedical complex', the establishment of Western health-care systems and the politics of global health, and such new technologies as insulin, penicillin, the oral contraceptive pill and in vitro fertilization. The lectures also introduce the powerful critiques these innovations have provoked.